By Lynette Owens
Week of September 2, 2013
To help you keep up with what’s going on with kids, families, schools, and technology, we’ve compiled a list of stories, tips, and insights, we’ve found most useful over the past week. What have you been reading? Tell us below or Tweet @TrendISKF.
STUDENT SURVEILLANCE: Some children will now become more accustomed to being monitored on social networks. Glendale Unified School District in California is paying $40,500 to Geo Listening to collect and analyze all public social media posts of its 13,000 middle and high school students, regardless of where it was posted.
BABIES ON TWITTER: Some media heavyweights are giving their children a head start on social media. Today show correspondent Jenna Wolfe, NBC News correspondent Stephanie Gosk, and ABC News correspondent Darren Rovell are just some of the parents who have created Twitter handles and tweet on behalf of their young children.
PROMOTING KIDS OR COMMUNITY?: While some are tweeting on their kids’ behalf, other parents are posting plenty about their kids on Facebook. Salon writer Andrew Leonard takes issue with Slate’s Amy Webb who claims posting pictures of your kids on social networks is “robbing” them “of a digital adulthood that’s free of bias and presupposition.”
NEW RESEARCH: Turns out parents in many parts of the world love posting pictures of their kids, sometimes even before they’re born. More in this new EU Kids online report of kids 0-8.
PRIVACY MATTERS: People are becoming increasingly aware and concerned about their online privacy, as noted in this new study by Pew. 50% of those surveyed are concerned about what can be found about them online, but 59% believe it’s not possible to be completely anonymous.
See you next week!
Lynette Owens is Vice President of Global Consumer Education & Marketing at Trend Micro and Founder of the Internet Safety for Kids and Families program. With 25+ years in the tech industry, Lynette speaks and blogs regularly on how to help kids become great digital citizens. She works with communities and 1:1 school districts across the U.S. and around the world to support online safety, digital and media literacy and digital citizenship education. She is a board member of the National Association for Media Literacy Education, an advisory committee member of the Digital Wellness Lab, and serves on the advisory boards of INHOPE and U.S. Safer Internet Day.
Follow her on Twitter @lynettetowens.